Part IV in a series of posts about how my guild was able to take casual raiding from Kara all the way into BT without selling our souls.

DKP is ready, and we've moved into 25-man raiding, and here comes the fun. For this iteration, I am going to use some real examples. We started pushing into 25-mans in June of '07. HKM died July 1st. By the end of November and going into our holiday break, we had killed a total of six bosses. That's 6 first kills in 6 months. We started back raiding the 2nd week of January or so, and by the end or February, we had 5 boss kills. So how did we go from one a month to 2.5 a month?

This is the most important thing I can instill in everyone, and the one that's probably going to be taken worst; you have to get hardcore about raiding.

Over the holiday break I decided that I wasn't happy with our slow progression. We weren't gearing fast enough, we were losing players all over the place, and at the rate we were moving forward, there is no way BT would be cleared before the next expansion, which was our ultimate goal. A change was needed. It was over the holiday break that I decided we were going to get hardcore about raiding. Specs were going to be checked. People were going to be flasked and food buffed. We were going to approach raiding with all the seriousness of a hardcore raid guild. That fact turned us around 180 degrees.

In The Burning Crusade, the raid game was initially tuned around the most hardcore guilds, with Blizzard expecting people who were investing in all the consumables they could use, using optimal group setups, and hitting this content four or more nights a week. The simple fact is, there is nothing that a hardcore guild does that a casual one can't. I can flask and gem and enchant the same as someone in Elitist Jerks and push the same numbers that they can. Maybe I can't field a perfectly optimal raid composition, but I can get close enough to see similar results. Once we started approaching this as something we really wanted, we started progressing at a BLAZING pace.

The simple fact is this. You have to set a goal, and you have to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Expecting someone to bring buff food to a raid isn't a big thing. Expecting use of a flask a night isn't a big thing. Expecting people to do a minimum of outside research isn't a big thing. But all this little things that people can do to help the raid add up very, very quickly, and it makes all the difference. The hard part is managing what amounts to a serious hardcore raid team in the midst of what is for us, a casual social guild.

How I do this is be separating the two completely. People that want to raid who are in the guild have to apply for a spot. They trial as any recruit would, and they are judges as anyone would. I expect raiders to come prepared, with flasks, food, reagents, oils, and whatever else we need to be successful. At one point we checked these things on a regular basis. Now it's ingrained. I push people to hop onto our guild forums for 5 minutes before they log into the game, to make sure that they are up too speed with any important news. These days, the only thing casual about raiding with ST is the amount of time you put in, which in many cases is the big limiter for people who want to raid.

Getting this mentality instilled in the raid isn't easy. For a long time we'd to buff checks on the raid to see who was properly flasked for a progression fight and who was being lazy. People were called out who didn't bring food for that week, or who forgot to get mana pots. I made a forum post that people couldn't raid until they had read and signed. I made a post asking people to send me a tell and they'd get 50g. I consistently remind people that they aren't only raiding for themselves, but for the other 24 in the raid that are setting their time aside as well. And it has all worked.

We were 6/6 3/4 when 2.4 opened up T6 raids. We were 5/5 6/9 when the 3.0 nerfs hit. In general I'd say for this expansion cycle we were about 3 weeks behind the correct curve for keeping up with content and staying legitimate. As it stands, we are the number 7 alliance guild on Mal'Ganis, and if we can get Brutallus down this week, we'll be number 20 overall. Our raid members have seen almost all the raids this expansion has to offer, and done it with as minimal time commitment as possible. And I've got some big plans for Wrath...